


Pig's Blood and Chocolate

by Ranae



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:35:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5057638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranae/pseuds/Ranae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy is interrogated-- kind of. He's not exactly sure what to call it. It fucks him up, a bit. But, in the end, maybe that's for the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ce faci?

Eggsy woke slowly. At first, he thought his eyes were too heavy to open, but he realized from the sticky, pulling sensation on his lashes that they are taped shut. Something was stuffed in his ears as well, and he couldn’t hear a thing. He wasn’t gagged though, for which he is profoundly grateful, because the feeling of breath slipping past his teeth was all that was keeping him from going mad with the claustrophobic panic of completely locked inside his own body.

He swept his body mentally, from top to bottom. He catalogued the bump on his head from where one of the henchmen got in a lucky kick, then the stuffed feeling and pain his nose that suggested it was, as he had feared, quite badly broken. That one hadn’t even been a henchmen, he’d slipped in the shower and gone face first into the toilet. He was just glad he hadn’t been wearing his glasses at the time: somehow he didn’t think gentlemen were meant to sustain toilet related injuries.

He didn’t have his glasses on now, either. He let his mind wander further down his body: bad crick in his neck, left shoulder dead under him (he must be lying on his side), fingers in contact with a hard, cool floor, probably tile, hands bound to the sides of his body by some type of rope wrapped around his waist, knee still throbbing (another shower related injury), ankles bound together and, shoes missing. He was wearing only an undershirt and boxers—neither of which, we suspected, were Kingsman issue.

 _Shit_ , he thought, distantly. _Sodding shit fuck cunt._

He was too angry to be afraid, but something told him that that would come. He took a breath and willed himself to go back to his last memories.

He was on a mission in Sudan, simple thing really; find the arms dealer, kill the arms dealer, and steal a few computers for the techs to crack. He’d found him, killed him—well, he’d kind of blown him up really, which had made Merlin grumble at him, and he’d taken the computers to the drop off point. Then he returned to the hotel to await his next instructions. He ordered room service, then—then it was all flashes:

Falling in the tub, giggling himself sick on the floor of the bathroom, which was half flooded with water and his own blood, and trying to figure out what to tell medical. Staring at himself in the bathroom mirror—not needing to wipe away the fog because he had been sitting for so long that it had dissipated. Thinking he was still dirty, still caked in blood, though it was his own this time, and that he should really get back in the shower.

He was sitting in the only chair in his room, looking out the window. The TV was on in the background for company. It was playing Al Jazeera, which, as was the case in most of the hotel’s he’d stayed in in North Africa, was the only English channel available. Though they did occasionally have the BBC, he still preferred Al Jazeera.

Drone strikes in Pakistan, he watched the cars on the street streak by—to fast, whirling together like a carousel as they turn on the roundabout. Peace talks in Yemen, he saw the tiny figure of a man dodge between the traffic. He should not be out so late at night. He should be home with his family, not here with Eggsy, listening to the Israeli President address the United Nations. His vision flickered, memory skipping time, sitting on the bed, watching at the window, seeing himself as if from above, smiling and waving at the other Eggsy laid out on the floor, a deflated boy skin rug--

 _Oh_ , he thought, coming out of his head with a jolt. _Drugged then_.

He didn’t know whether to hope the glasses were recording or not.

He decided to move, but before he could even twitch a muscle, he felt a shift in the air in the front of his face, and the tape on his eyes was ripped off, taking more than a few of his eyelashes with it. His eyes snapped open, but all he could see was a blue button up shirt. A second later the plugs were wrenched out of his ears.

The button-up shirt retreated, revealing a small, squat man with an atrocious mustache. He wasn’t one of the henchmen, didn’t look like any of the people on the list of known associates that Eggsy had memorized, and he seemed so incongruous  in the situation that Eggsy blurted, “who the fuck are you, then?”

The man seemed deeply unimpressed.

“Never mind,” he said. His voice was deep and carried a trace of accent that Eggsy couldn’t put a finger on.

They were in a tiny, low ceilinged room. It was dark and cave like, shadows clinging to the walls like spider webs. Eggsy was, as he had thought, bound around the waist by a thick leather strap. The strap was attached by chain leads to four hooks, two on the ceiling and two on the walls of the room. The leads were lax enough to give him the room to sit up, which he did, very carefully.

It seemed like a bondage scene out of the kind of porn Eggsy always found too forced and fake to watch without snickering. At least there were no clamps on his nipples. Small mercies, and all that.

“Can you breathe through your nose?” The man asked, crouching down a little to look into his eyes, the way Eggsy did with his sister when she’d done something bad.

“Yeh,” he said, but took a few unobtrusively deep breaths, just to make sure he was right. It felt like breathing through a straw but otherwise, he was fine.

“Sorry about your nose,” the little man said. He seemed genuinely apologetic. “I must have diluted the dosage too much, you shouldn’t have even made it to the shower.”

“S’alright mate,” Eggsy said. Then frowned, unsure as to why he’d bothered.

The man seemed just as confused, “I drugged you, there’s no need to reassure me. Anyway, I really am sorry about the nose. My supervisor will be in in a minute to look in on you. I’ll have her bring you a bit of water and some food.”

Eggsy just nodded. The man opened the door and shut it behind him. From what Eggsy could tell, he didn’t lock it. That made him feel worse about the whole thing, somehow. That they were so confident in their ability to keep him that they didn’t even bother to lock the door. He sat back and pressed his back against the wall of the room. It was unpleasantly damp, and the chill seemed to pull the warmth from his body.

He shuddered. He was still angry, but the fear was slowly beginning to gnaw at him. He willed his training to take over, looking for the icy calm that came over him when he had a gun in his hand. He tested the leather bindings, and found that in addition to being bound to his side, his wrists were held in metal cuffs, that dug into his flesh when he tried to twist them free. If he were able to fall on his hand properly, he might be able to dislocate his thumb and pull his hand free, but the cuffs were so tight to his wrists he doubted it would be possible. He tugged at them until his shoulders ached, but the leather barely even creaked.

Next, he pulled at the leads, crawling forward and seeing now far of a reach he had. It was about a quarter of the room, and he couldn’t get anywhere near the door. Or anywhere near any of the hooks. The hooks remained disdainfully stationary, no matter how much pressure he exerted downwards. He imagined they were laughing at him, as much as metal could laugh, really.

He gave up, made himself sit and examine the room. No point in expending energy. There did not seem to be any cameras or microphones, only four whitish-grey walls, a tiled floor and a ceiling that looked like poured concrete. A single bulb hung from the ceiling just above the door, well out of his reach.

His perusal of the room and his restraints had distracted him, but distantly, the fear had been growing. The longed for calm refused to come. His stomach felt like it was full pins.

He had been captured. By someone. Possibly friends of his mark, who had taken issue with Eggsy blowing him and his warehouse of horrors up. Or possibly someone else, someone entirely unconnected to this job. A friend of someone else he had blown up or otherwise forcibly removed from earth. Someone with a grudge against Kingsman. Or maybe they didn’t even know he was a Kingsman and he was to be sold into a bizarre slave ring that forced fit young men to fight each other to the death for the amusement of rich benefactors.

Admittedly, the last one was a bit shaky, but he’d been a Kingsman over a year now and very little surprised him.

The door opened and his gladiator fantasy was cut short. A woman stepped into the room.

“Hello,” she said, cheerful as anything. She carried a plastic tray in her arms, it had a plastic cup and what looked like a sandwich on it.

She was older than him, that much he could tell, but he couldn’t have guessed her age with any more accuracy than one of those carnival machines. Her skin was a dark olive, and it draped over her form leisurely, neither wrinkled nor pulled tight. She had large, sharp features and green almond shaped eyes. A tiny white scar decorated her upper lip, twisting it slightly in a way that was not all together unpleasant, rather it seemed like she was about to smile, but hadn’t decided whether she wanted to or not. She looked like the kind of woman rich men draped in furs, and helped into expensive, yet unassuming, vehicles. The black dress she wore covered her from wrist to ankle, obscuring most of her body. Even so, one glance at her hands, which were thick knuckled and strong looking, told him all he needed to know. She was one of them.

“Hello,” he said.

“I have some refreshment,” she said, pointing her chin at the tray in her arms. She spoke with an American accent, but the stress pattern she used suggested that, like the squat man, English was not her mother tongue. “Unfortunately, I’ll have to feed it to you. But don’t worry, there are no cameras in here.”

“Not hungry,” he said, though he was as a parched as a man who’d crossed the Sahara on foot and twice as hungry. Huh, he was getting pretty good at metaphors. Or was it a simile?

She looked put out by this, as though the prospect of feeding him enthralled her. Her full lower lip stuck out in a parody of a pout, “we’re not going to drug you again, not when you’ve just woken up.”

“Still not hungry.”

He affected a posh accent, thinking of Harry, but he could tell she wasn’t buying it. Forget a piercing gaze; her eyes shredded his skin like a vegetable peeler, raking over him in a way that was physically jolting. He felt as if she had just watched his life unfold like a flipbook, that no matter what lies he told her, she would be able to read the truth off his body. And not just tell if he was lying or not, but whole sentences, whole mission reports, flickering across his forehead like tickertape.

A sigh then, gusty and indelicate, “Fine. I’m leaving it here so you can stare at it and be tempted, though. It’s a Nutella sandwich. Chocolate on bread, can’t go wrong with that.”

She leaned against the wall opposite him, next to the door, and slowly let herself slide down. When she reached the floor, she crossed her legs and placed the tray next to her.

“You must be concerned,” she said, after several minutes, the bulk of which Eggsy spent staring at the sandwich, being tempted. He did love Nutella.

“Bit,” he admitted calmly, rolling his shoulders as best he could, “but I’m sure reinforcements are on their way.”

 “Probably,” she nodded, looking supremely unconcerned, “but I didn’t kidnap Galahad without knowing the whole roundtable would be on my ass for it.”

“And why did you kidnap me, exactly?”

It was at this point that he expected her smile to change and become darker, for her face to twist and become the mask of a spy, or, as he suspected, a torturer. Then she would tell him exactly what they needed, and exactly what she was going to do to him to get it.

But her amicable expression did not waver, “sorry about that.  Alfonse feels terrible about your nose, as well. We iced it while you were out, but it’s still pretty gnarly. Shame, you’re such a handsome young man. I suspect Arthur will be most displeased. Anyway, your people brought in someone I’d like returned. We’re going to do a bit of a trade.”

“They’re not going to negotiate with you,” Eggsy said, with derision. Perhaps she didn’t know as much about Kingsman as she thought, they still had not replaced Arthur, even though it had been nearly a year since V-Day.

“They might. Plus, I was curious about the new recruit. Galahad. Great name, by the way. Mine’s Lavinia, if you wanted to know,” She was relaxed against the wall, one leg hauled up to her chest and the other straight out on the floor. It made her skirt ride up to her knees, and he could see a few faint scars on her shin.

“Lavinia,” he repeated. It was an effort not to scrunch up his nose, while not particularly difficult, the name sat uncomfortably on his tongue. Lah-veen-ya, Lah-veen-ee-ya, Lah-veen-a, even though she’d just pronounced it for him, he couldn’t get his mouth around it.

“Close enough,” she said, smirking. “It trips people up, for whatever reason. I’m sure you’ve been called ‘Eggy’ more than once.”

He harrumphed, it little rankled him to find that she knew his real name. And that she’d tossed the information out so lightly, “by posh fucks, mostly. Who do y’work for, anyway?”

And there went the accent. Subtle, Eggsy, real fucking subtle.

“No one all that important.”

“Not the CIA?”

She gasped like a soap opera actress, adopting an overly offended air, “You think I’m a fucking American? Fuck the CIA, the self-righteous pigs. They’re eventually going to get us all killed, the Americans. Anyway, that Valentine chap was an American, wasn’t he?--” here Eggsy couldn’t stop himself from flinching, and while she didn’t stop her rambling, he knew she noticed, “-- that guy was a piece a’ work. What kind of arrogance is it, that these people have, that makes them believe they, as individuals, or as a nation, have any kind of moral authority on how the planet ought to be run? Who was he to decide what was best of the world? Jack ass.”

The dramatism tapered off around halfway through the speech, and she spoke with genuine passion, though she didn’t as much as twitch, still relaxed against the wall, hands in her lap. Her accent was stronger in the monologue, and Eggsy though it might be Eastern Europe, maybe.

“FSB?”

She looked as putout as when he rejected the sandwich, “you’re no fun. And the answer is no, anyway.”

“Nothin’ to say ‘bout the Russians? Nothin' ‘bout Old Vlad, and his pack of winged monkeys,” he wriggled his eyebrows, but stopped when his nose throbbed.

Lavinia hummed, “Vovochka? I rather enjoy him, sometimes, anyway. Did you know he has a dog called Conny, which is rumoured to be named after Condoleezza Rice? Another blood sucking, self-satisfying windbag if there ever was one. And that he brought it to a meeting with Angela Merkel because he knows how much she fears dogs? I don’t mind Angela, honestly, she’d not half bad, but I still fucking laughed. He’s quite awful, really, from the business in Chechnya to his support for dear old Assad, but I can’t quite stop myself from smiling when I think about him. Most world leaders are monsters, anyway.”

At this she jumped to her feet in a single smooth motion.

“Where you goin’?” Eggsy asked. He’d been almost enjoying their chat, despite himself.

“I’m afraid there’s something I have to take care of,” she said, looking a little sheepish. She bent down and picked up the cup of water, before unceremoniously throwing it in his face.

“What the hell!” He sputtered, shaking his head like a dog, “this your idea of water torture? Because I have to say, your technique is a bit fucking off.”

She rolled her eyes, “I already told you, I’m not going to interrogate you.”

“You never told me that!”

“Oh…” she blinked, and stared down at the cup in her hand, bemused, “sorry. Umm, I’m not going to interrogate you. Or kill you.”

“But you are an interrogator, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted, drawing the word out. “And unfortunately very practiced in the enhanced variety, as our brothers in the CIA like to euphemistically put it.”

“You’re a torturer then?”

“Not usually,” she hesitated, looking between him and the door, “Anyway, who calls themselves ‘a torturer’? It just sounds weird. ‘Even interrogator’ sounds weird. Look, I’ll explain in a minute. I suppose it would be too much to ask you to cooperate?”

“Yep.”

She wrapped twice on the door. A few moments later the squat man entered, holding a metal box and two long sticks. They were the kind of sticks you might put in your garden to keep the tomatoes from toppling over. Not that Eggsy had ever had a garden, but you saw this shit around. The room, already small, tightened with the addition of another person.

“We can’t just blow dart him?” the man complained testily, looking much more harassed than the last time they had seen each other.

“I’m afraid not,” Lavinia said, and patted him on the shoulder. She took the box from him and continued, “I have every faith in you, Al.”

She stepped back into the doorway, and the man came forward with the sticks.

“I only want to gag you,” the squat man, apparently called Al, said. He spoke gently, like he was talking to a frightened animal, but the set of his shoulders was tense.

“Come on over,” Eggsy said, snapping his jaw a few times and grinning wildly.

“I’m not getting that close to a Kingsman agent,” Al snorted. “Probably knock me out with your abs, or something.”

He brought the sticks up, one of which had a strip of leather knotted like a hang man’s noose on the end of it. The other had a small blade crudely taped onto it, and he held it like a staff, blade pointed to the ceiling. Eggsy stared at the blade, it wouldn’t be hard to dislodge if he—

He flinched back, but too slowly, as the man swung the up butt end of the stick up and struck him on the underside of his nose, scraping his lip slightly with the stick’s ragged end. Tears filled his eyes, agony screaming through every nerve in his body—other than ball pain, nose pain was his least favorite. He knew it was only a diversion, so he tried to twist away, but the squat man was too fast. He felt the leather catch on his ear, then tweak his nose, sending a fresh wave of agony through his body, before it settled on his mouth. The man pulled it taught, snapping Eggsy’s head forward. Then, keeping him kneeling in his extended position, the man used the knife stick to cut the end of the leather strip.

The whole procedure lasted no more than twenty-five seconds.

“Sorry,” the man said, “about the nose. We would have gagged you while you were asleep, but then you might have asphyxiated. Also—please let Lavinia know if you feel you’re going to asphyxiate, and she will cut the gag. I imagine you still can’t breathe very well through your noise.”

“MMhhhmmgg,” Eggsy growled through the gag, tears still streaming down his face. Christ, this was just getting more and more embarrassing. Fresh blood welled under his nose, and dripped down his chin from where his lips had been scrapped.

“Thanks Al,” Lavinia said, and the man departed, taking his sticks with him. She opened the metal box and withdrew a spray bottle. She stepped a bit closer to him, probably only a few centimetres out of his range and began to spray him with it. It spirted out viscous red liquid with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, and it fell on him in clotted globules, more like hail than mist.

“Hurm?” he enquired through the gag, trying to convey his irritation, and shut his eyes against it. The leather strap was tight around his mouth and chin, but he began to rotate his jaw forwards and back in an attempt to loosen it. It wouldn’t hold forever, but he suspected his captor didn’t need it to.

“I said I wasn’t going to interrogate you, but they don’t know that,” she said, still standing above him with the spray bottle, which he was now certain was full of blood, looking like some kind of deranged orchid hobbyist. “Admittedly, this is a pretty weak move. Any idiot will be able to tell it’s not real blood spatter. Well, they could if they were here or they had a good camera. But we banged up your glasses a bit, which was _not_ easy, so Merlin’s only going to get shades of what’s going on.

Besides, they know a good interrogator doesn’t beat people up, or pull of their finger nails or anything like that. That’s the kind of thing movie torturers do. The best way to make someone talk is to give them what they want—a nice house, a life, school for their children. Most people just get caught up in bad things. You build a rapport, have a little chit chat, do a little research, and there you go. No need to enhance anything. Beyond that, well, I usually drug people or put them in solitary or something.”

The blood was cold, and already beginning to congeal in the inside of his arms and where it had dripped in under the gag. It made his skin crawl, but he couldn’t do anything other than wriggle ineffectively in his bonds and hope he would at least be able to make some of it splash onto his captor. Revenge was a dish best served petty. 

She stepped back, regarded him for a few moments, like an artist contemplating a canvas, and added a few spritzes to his boxers. Then she removed a small case from the box, and took out his glasses. They did look a bit worse for wear, but Eggsy had no doubt they were recording. The spray bottle was held firmly behind her back, and the metal box kicked distractedly into the corner.

Lavinia put them on, they stretched a little over her wide face, but she didn’t seem bothered.

“Good Morning, Mr. Merlin,” she said. Her voice had utterly changed—where it had been warm, and slightly deep for a woman, it was now several octaves higher, though unquestionably male. Her accent had also shifted to sound more—Latin. Spanish or Italian, maybe, but probably belonging to someone who had spent time living in an English speaking country. The whole effect of it was rather unnerving, her voice and way of speaking was utterly altered, while her posture and facial expressions remained the same. “You have something of mine. The man you know as Vladislav Hinton, believed to be a member of the Austrian militant men’s right’s group, is, in fact Franz Stein. He is one and a half metres tall, two hundred pounds and he has a small scar over the bridge of his nose. Drop him at the Ibis Hotel in Vienna. Then we will return your new Galahad.”

She waited a minute, then clearly replying to the voice in her ear, “yes, the Ibis. Budget cuts affect us all. Until he calls me from the Ibis, I will continue chatting with Galahad _._ Who knows what the conversation will turn to? In an hour, I suspect one of us will begin revealing secrets. But who will it be?”

Eggsy, for his part, was trying to figure out how to blink the Morse code for ‘she’s lying’. When he looked up to do the blinking, he saw himself reflected in the glasses. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His nose was a right mess, looking more like a smashed beet than a human organ, the side of his head was had goose egg so large it looked like a parasitic twin, and he was soaked with water and blood.

“Hrrmm,” Eggsy said, in what he hoped was a reassuring way, raising his eyebrows up and down at the camera, like he was making faces at Daisy.

“Eloquent,” Lavinia said dryly, though the voice remained distinctly not-hers, some of her old cadence returned, “well done, Merlin, he very nearly knows how to talk. Rigorous selection process, eh? Though I heard this one didn’t kill his dog, so in my opinion, he’s the best agent you’ve ever managed to hire. Well, goodbye for now.”

She put the glasses back in the case, and the case into the box. Then she leaned in a bit closer to him and stuck a finger under the gag, and pulled it away from his face. He didn’t bother resisting. It fell around his neck, and she stepped back into her corner while he gulped air.

“Did I see you trying to blink Morse code?” She narrowed her eyes at him. Her voice had returned to normal, “weak effort, my dear. Unless ‘stfs.yefg.’ is some kind of Kingsman code.”

Eggsy shrugged, “I think you’re just seein’ things. Paranoia will destroy yeh. How’d you know about the dog thing?”

“Everybody knows about the dog thing,” she said, and slid back down the wall into her old position, setting aside the spray bottle, “it’s a legend in the Intelligence community.”

“I thought nobody was supposed to know about Kingsman?”

She rolled her eyes, “Having a selection process where like thirty young people, many of whom leave with a grudge, find out about your organization at a time doesn’t help. These things get out. I think it’s a bit sick. Like, it’s the kind of thing you would expect from the Mossad or the old order KGB. ‘Kill this defenceless creature that you have raised from birth because I told you to’. I mean, it doesn’t actually die, and if it was the Mossad or the KGB, _it_ _would_ _actually_ _die_ , but it’s still seriously messed up.”

“ _Thank_ _you_ ,” Eggsy muttered. He was still pretty peeved about the whole thing, honestly. “So, you Mossad then?”

She laughed, a full bodied, dark thing, full of derision, “If I was Mossad—well, this conversation would have gone a whole lot differently. Ever met a Mossad agent?”

“Nah.”

“Not that you know of,” she corrected, waving her index finger at him. She was smiling again, almost playful, “I was in Haifa for a few months a while back, dealing with some Albanian—erm, issues. My eighty-five year old Yemeni Jewish landlady turned out be a twenty year old male Ethiopian Mossad agent, wearing an alarmingly small amount of make-up and a wig. I lived there for three months and never suspected a thing. One minute the little old lady was pouring me tea, the next I was looking down the business end of a SIG Saucer. I nearly shat myself. Fucking Mossad.”

Eggsy snorted, then winced when his eyes teared up again, “think that’s bad? A few months ago I got fooled by an RAW guy pretendin’ t’ be a fuckin’ potted plant. He knocked me over the head before I even had a chance. Techs had a right chuckle over that, lemme tell you.”

“Oh, that’s why I don’t wear a camera,” she waved her hands in sweeping motion, “too many cock-ups. I was once chlorophormed by a perfume salesman.”

“I’m goin’ to remember that! Alright, this one cunt came down the chimney of a safe house I was holed up in, yelled ‘Happy Christmas’ and fuckin’ shot my hostage. Worst gift ever.”

She giggled, “I’ve got a good one, actually, it involved someone you know. It also might make you feel a bit better about being drugged in a toilet.”

“Oh? And who would that be?”

“The former Galahad, Mr. Harry Hart.”

Eggsy stilled, the laughter abruptly draining out of him, “what is it?”

She was watching him very carefully, he saw. She was an interrogator, after all, she had told him herself, and he had no reason to disbelieve her. She continued in a more serious tone, “Nothing too awful, I promise. I have a pretty good acquaintance at MI6, we’ve worked a few gigs together. Let’s call him 00 Sleven. Your Galahad was tasked with having a little chat with Mr. Sleven, of the private variety, of course. So he broke into his house and decided to have a wait. This was a favorite move of Mr. Sleven’s, you see, and he wanted to turn the tables. After a few hours, he was possessed with an extremely urgent need to make use of the facilities. He did so, but when he finished, he found he couldn’t open the door.

He tried to kick it down, shoot it out, and pick the lock, but to no avail. Mr. Sleven had reinforced the door too well, as that tiny bathroom was, in fact, his own private panic room. You see, the day before, Mr. Sleven had been tipped off about the gig, so he saw to it that Galahad was slipped a substance which would cause—sudden intestinal distress. Then he set his safe room to automatic lock, and cheerfully left for a mission to lovely Malta. Kingsman had to call MI6 and request that the door be unlocked after four days, because Galahad was beginning to look a little peaky.”

Eggsy couldn’t help but snigger. He could imagine the frown on Harry’s face, see him sitting glumly on the side of the tub, waiting to be extricated, listening to the voice of Merlin cackling in his ear. Eggsy would have never let him live it down.

“D’you know him well? The Galahad before me?” Eggsy asked, after they had sat in silence for a few minutes, Lavinia grinning distantly, eyes still looking into the past. He wondered how long ago that had been, but decided not to ask.

“I did know him,” she hesitated, looking a bit embarrassed, “actually, I interrogated him once. I didn’t touch a curl on his head, so you can stop looking at me like that.”

Eggsy reluctantly reigned in his frown, “well?”

She was giving him that look again, like a bear watching a salmon swim by, still deciding whether or not to take a strike at it, “Well, I liked the old Galahad. Bit prissy, but a good enough guy. That stuffed dog, though, seriously. Mr. Pickle, what the fuck? I’m meant to know people, you know, understand them, but even I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole.”

“Y’know about that fuckin’ thing then? Fuckin’ creepiest thing I ever saw. He kept him in the shitter, too, with a fuckin’ flock of butterfly’s to keep him company.”

“Mr. Pickle is in every file ever in existence about Galahad senior, though admittedly, there are very few of them. Whenever someone asked ‘who was that guy?’, the answer was ‘Galahad. He’s a Kingsman. You know, he has a taxidermy dog called Mr. Pickle.’ I don’t know who first found out about it, but they clearly couldn’t let it go.”

Eggs hadn’t been able to let Mr. Pickle go, either. Ugh, that sounded like some kind of horrible euphemism. The sodding thing was a regular character in his nightmares, often taking the role of the villain, from though, in one particularly horrifying sequence, Eggsy’d looked in a mirror to find he, himself, had become Mr. Pickle. He’d spent a few sleepless nights over that one.

“I thought maybe it weren’t that weird, for a spy?”

“Nope. Very weird. Therapy weird.”

“Huh.”

“He put you forward as a candidate, right?”

“Yah. You’re goin’ to have tell me how you know these things, bruv, its gettin’ a bit worryin’.” Eggsy would have crossed his arms if he could move them.

“It’s just gossip,” she said carelessly, tossing her curls over one shoulder, “He was your mentor?”

“Could say that.” He was rapidly becoming uncomfortable with this line of questioning.

“Did you care about him?” She was playing with her hair now, gently pulling apart split ends and looking so nonchalant he couldn’t help but be suspicious. No agent ever looked that carefree. Especially not one that trussed agents up like virgin sacrifices.

“’Course I did. What you on about?”

“You trust him?”

“Yeh,” Eggsy said, frowning openly now, “he was a good bloke, innit he?”

“For a spy,” she allowed, “but then, even the least poisonous krait can still kill you.”

Lavinia looked away from him, and was quiet for a while. Eggsy tried to digest what she was saying. On one hand, he wanted to know more about Harry, on the other… he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what she had to say. She could be lying, she was a spy too, after all. And probably among the more poisonous of the kraits. But something in him believed she would tell him the truth, or at least, that she wouldn’t lie too much.

“I always recognize my own kind,” she said slowly, in a seeming non-sequitur, just when Eggsy was sure he was going to have to restart the conversation, “when I see a Romanian walking down the street, I know they are a Romanian. Budapest to Bangkok, I see a Romanian and I know. I see an agent, and I know,” she paused, and looked into his eyes, her eerie green gaze holding his, drawing him in to this rapid turn in conversation, even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to follow her, “and, when I saw you, I knew.”

“That I was an agent,” he said dumbly, it wasn’t even a question because he didn’t have the conviction to make it one. His heart was hammering, and he knew that that wasn’t what she meant, knew exactly what she meant, because sometimes, he could see it too.

“You know what I mean. You and me, we weren’t just knocked around when we got out of hand. We grew up with violence the way some people grow up with dogs,” she said, with certainty. “Not much of a jump. Intelligence work is full of them, they often have no family they care about, know how to take pain, good at reading people’s intentions, take betrayal and keep coming back for more, sometimes even having a slight predilection to violence. Able to emotionally detach themselves without much training. Kingsmen has always been a bit of an exception, in that regard. Full of posh psychopaths, not many of _us_.”

Eggsy just stared at her, kept staring even when she blinked and looked away. She looked tired in the harsh lighting of the concrete room, though she had few lines on her face, they seemed to be etched as deeply as scars.

“When I was very small, I ran away from home. After a few months of living on the streets, I met a man in Bucharest who told me he looked after lost little children like me. I loved him with a religious devotion. And he did look after me, for a while, but soon I had to earn my own keep. He called all the girls Andrea and all the boys Andrei. Some of them really believed that those were their real names, but I always remembered that mine was Lavinia.

Some years later, when I was a teenager, I was recruited. Sometime between then and now, I made friends with a younger agent. We both liked languages, and Chinese literature. We used to have conversations in four or five different languages at a time, effortlessly. He was the only other person I’ve met who could do that. He was probably the first person I truly trusted since the man in Bucharest. We were only friends, mind, he was too young for me, my tastes always ran… too old. Some wounds never heal.

Anyway, you can probably tell where this is going. He betrayed me. It seems a paltry word for it, but it’s the only one I can think of. I’d been betrayed before, it comes with the territory. There have been honey pots, lovers stealing information, partners trying to shoot me in the back, handlers trying to poison me, double agents, triple agents. I never let it bother me.

He barely even put my life in danger. But even so…” she smiled a horrible, twisted smile, and shook her head, “even so…I was _ashes_. Food had no taste, I couldn’t laugh, couldn’t cry or summon enough emotion to even be embarrassed about what had happened. After twenty years of making myself the strong one, I was seven years old again in an instant, powerless and dead-eyed.

They usually beat this into recruits, by Merlin’s too soft on you lot: in letting the dogs live, he teaches you to trust Kingsman, trust that it will look after you, even when it doesn’t seem like they will. And by trust I mean the belief that Kingsman will not actively harm you, mentally or physically, which is something most other agencies don’t guarantee. But if the dogs had died, you would have been taught to be loyal without trust and without question, which may seem harsh, but in the long run it’s much kinder. I’m sure you heard about the Silva incident at MI6?

So I’ll tell you, agent to agent, don’t fucking think of trusting them in the way they expect you to. Not Merlin, not Arthur, not your handlers, and certainly not your fellow agents. Don’t allow yourself to feel surprise or hurt when they lie to you, betray you. Instead, feel surprise every time they have a chance to betray you, but fail to do so. It’s not worth the regression, Eggsy, it’s—I would give anything not to go back there. Anything. A part of me would slaughter him if I ever saw him again—but another part of me would whisper that I deserved it, that he was right to do it to me, and I fear I would let him live. A part of me thinks I was born deserving it.

Galahad senior was the first authority you put your trust in, well, in years, probably. He even pulled you out of it. You feel beholden to him. Loyal, even to his memory. And if he does not live up to the version of him you have come to know, what then? Where will you be?”

He would be ten years old and hiding in a suitcase under his mother’s bed from the nice man who brought him toy cars and took him to have ice cream. The hot darkness filling his lungs as he pulled in air, straining for the sound of footsteps, every muscle in his body contorted and twitching with impotent terror, then, hearing the footsteps, the stagger that was too heavy to be his mother. Sorry, so sorry, not even the tiniest part of himself feeling anything like anger.

In the present, his breath shuddered through his chest. Dried blood flaked off his face, and the skin under it itched like new skin under a scab. She looked very kind, sitting there across from him. She was a dangerous person, a killer, like him. An interrogator, a torturer, which, he felt, was somehow worse.

But hers had been worse life, probably, and he was like a child with a clam, curious to see if there was a pearl inside, but not wanting to break the shell and kill the creature to get it. He wanted to know exactly how bad her life had been, every detail, to taste her misery, feel his guts squirm with her pain and draw himself back, like an emotional tourist, sampling the local culture but always knowing that he had a safe home to return to. He wanted to know if she had allowed the man in Bucharest to live. If she had gone back, fully trained and deadly, and still cowered at the sight of him, of the way he smelled like clove cigarettes and cheap beer, the sound of his raised voice and mother screaming, sister crying—

He clenched his fists in the restraints. They were suddenly too tight, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe and every muscle in his body was tensed with the need to rip himself out of his confinement, to find Daisy, to find his mother and never, ever leave them alone again. He was no tourist, could never be, her pain bled into his, her memories curdled his thoughts and drove them unceasingly towards the past.

“Eggsy.”

Someone was calling him, but all he could feel were hands on his shoulders, pushing him down and—

His mother, to fucking wasted to even cry out when Dean laid into her, her lack of response only feeding his anger, wrenching Eggsy from where he was skulking and—

“Eggsy Unwin! _Galahad_! Damn it, Galahad listen to me!”

 _There’s a good boy_ , and there are so many, so fucking _much_ , he would count if he wasn’t to fucked on Michelle’s Xanax to—

Something struck him in the face, and he jolted back to himself, crossing a dozen years in an instant. He opened his eyes, unsure when he had closed them. The room flickered back into focus, he saw Lavinia across from him, half standing and looking concerned, then he looked down into his lap, at the flakes of blood and… huh.

“Did you throw a sandwich at me?” he muttered, voice hoarse, looking down at the two slices of brown bread, which had come apart and were each stuck to a different leg of his boxers. “Fuck, it’s gonna look like I shit myself.”

“I had no choice,” Lavinia said, looking grave. She slid back down to the floor. They both sat staring at each other for a few seconds, then exploded into laughter. Lavinia’s shoulders jerked up and down, chest rumbling, while Eggsy sounded like he had a hacking cough.

“What the fuck,” he managed, “call yourself a spy… throwin’ a sandwich at a man!”

“What kind of man throws a _sandwich_?” She said in a faux British accent, voice shot through with giggles. “Oh, there’s some on your face! I’m not getting close enough to get it, sorry, but I’ve seen the kind of damage Kingsman do.”

“s’alright. Compliment, innit?”

“Figure it anyway you like. I’m going to send you back to Merlin covered in pig’s blood and chocolate! Enjoy the debrief.”

“Eh, no worse than any of the others.” His laughter had faded into a smile, which hung easy around the corners of his mouth, “do I tell him you interrogated me?”

“You can tell him I meant to, then I pussied out. You can tell him all of it, or as much as you want to. It’s nothing that’s not in my file, one way or another. Nothing on you that I couldn’t have found in your records.”

“If I told him about you, I’d have to tell him about me, wouldn’t I? I mean, he knows. But he don’t _know_.”

“Right. Well, tell him I say hi,” She tipped forward, putting her chin in her hand like a girl at a sleepover, wriggling her eyebrows, “that’s all. ‘Lavinia says hi.’”

“Sure thing, bruv.”

He calmed his breathing, slowly. His eyes were watering, leaking tears that, in his dehydrated state, he didn’t really think he could afford spare. His nose was burning, but he was already used to the pain, and only a vague awareness of it flickered at the edges of his consciousness. The cuts on his lip had opened back up, and he sucked the blood into his mouth. He wanted to gnaw at them, but he kept his teeth behind his lips with some effort. 

“Galahad,” Lavinia said softly, and when he looked up at her, her expression was serious. The laughter of a few minutes before seemed insane, the echoes of it, still ringing in his ears, were full of desperation. “What happened to you?”

“I—“ he found himself wanting to tell her, to spill it all, even though he knew that this may have been her plan all along _. Build a rapport, have a little chit chat_ , wasn’t that what she’d said? He tried to speak again, to voice these concerns, in some utterly flippant, nonchalant way, but he couldn’t force the words past his teeth. The only words that came, clustering in his gums and leering from between his teeth, were words of pain. He swallowed, silent. In a way, it was still too new. It started so long ago, but it’d just ended. Maybe, hasn’t ended, with the way his mother comes stumbling home at all hours, the way his sister was just a little bit behind her playmates. He caught Lavinia’s eye, and she nodded, as if she’d seen it, read it off his face like it was a fucking tattoo.

“It’s not that noticeable,” she said, following his train of thought perfectly. “And anyway, it takes one to know one, usually, so if they know you, you know them.”

He nodded, still quiet, pensive. Then, “have you ever…?”

“No,” she said, still in his head with him, “only one night, maybe two, I find them, take them, and return them to the world. As I’ve gotten older, it has gotten easier. I almost feel as though I could have someone.”

“No, you don’t,” he swallowed. Saliva was welling in his mouth, the way it did when he was about to throw-up. His stomach churned. It was probably all the blood he’d swallowed. He curled his knees up into his chest and leaned his chin on one, instinctively shielding the source of pain like it was an open wound. 

“Maybe a woman,” she admitted. Her wistful look, a blink and you miss it expression, caught him in the chest, “I’ve never felt much towards women, but the company would be nice. You can have someone, though. It’s not hopeless. I looked up some of the Andreas, a few years ago. Some married, had children.”

“How many is ‘some’?”

“Not many.”

“How many are on the fuckin’ street? How many dead? More or less than the married ones?”

“More.”

“They all still fuckin’ callin’ themselves ‘Andrea’?”

“…some. But, what happened to us was… extreme. You—maybe a fellow agent would work, huh? Don’t try for a functionally human being right off. Work your way up to it. Start with one of your posh psychopaths. The crazier the better.”

“You mean like someone who stuffs his pets, er somethin’?”

Lavinia, who had been leaning bonelessly against the wall, went rigid, blinking out at him from under the curtain of her hair, “no.”

Oh, that’s fucked him. Shite. But Harry was fucking dead, so what did it matter, anyway? The only one he was exposing was himself, and he was basically a raw nerve in skivvies and leather at this point, anyway.

She was still looking at him in askance, but he just nodded. It had only been one night, then they’d fought and he’d gone and died. But Eggsy had wanted more, even if he wasn’t sure Harry had. Even after the dog thing, he had a kind of terrible hope. Harry’s death had let him to keep it alive, and he had allowed the stillborn relationship to grow to maturity in his imagination. It wasn’t healthy, probably, but neither was killing people for a living.

They sat in silence for a moment, before Lavinia said, in a strained voice, “I have so many Mr. Pickle jokes right now.”

Eggsy giggled helplessly, trying to stifle himself by pushing his mouth into his knee until his teeth nipped at the skin. He probably had chocolate all over his under-shirt now, too.

“Let’s close the door,” she said, with finality, and his eyes flickered up to find hers. “I don’t want you to tell me anymore. I’ve let it go too far already.”

“Might as well be you, if I can’t trust anyone, anyway,” he said into his knee. “This has been a pretty fuckin’ dark conversation, bruv.”

“Well, your friends at Kingsman have another ten minutes to deliver my boy,” she told him, “so how about I teach you some Russian until then? I have a feeling you may need it in the near future.”

Her expression was earnest, and he wondered if she really felt bad, or if she just knew she ought to feel bad. Fuck, she was starting to make him think he got off lucky.

“Sure your not FSB?”

“I’m sure.”

“Alright, but I’m shite at languages.”

Lavinia shrugged. She adjusted her position, sitting up a bit straighter and catching his eye. Her gaze looked—well normal, actually, like the way a normal, well-adjusted human being would look at another well-adjusted human being. It was the biggest fucking charade of the entire conversation.

“ _Ya ne amerikanets_ : ‘I am not American’. _Ne prikasaytes k moemu zontiku_ : ‘Don’t touch my umbrella’.”

He repeated the phrases dutifully, snickering at the way she turned up her nose at his pronunciation.  

“I’m hopeless,” He said, after his third repetition had her shaking her head, and looking to the ceiling, as if appealing for divine intervention.

“I speak nine languages, Galahad. You can master a few phrases of one. Alright, try this, then: _bros pistolet, suka_ : ‘drop the gun, bitch’. _Poshyol na hui_ : effectively, but not quite literally, ‘fuck you”

“Which ones?”

“Hm?”

“Which languages?”

The woman contemplated him for a moment, then said, “In the order that I learned them: Vlax Romani, Romanian, Albanian, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, and English. And a bit of Balochi, not fluently though, as well as a few other local languages. Plus, I can do a few different Arabic dialects, Egyptian and Gulf are my strongest.”

It was a peace offering: it gave him as clear a picture of her history as he was likely to get out of her.

“Thought you said you liked Chinese books?” He asked, suspicious.

“Chinese literature. It’s translated, obviously. Alright, let’s go. Enough stalling. The second one is particularly important.” 

He took to those phrases much better than the first ones. Halfway through his fourth repetition, which had his captor looking hopeful, there was a knock at the door. A second later, Al stepped inside.

“Just talked to Stein,” the man said quietly, “the girls are picking him up now. He’s a bit beat up, but otherwise he’s fine. They didn’t start on him.”

Lavinia nodded, “good,” then she turned to Eggsy, “what did I tell you, sometimes agencies can be downright reasonable.”

“You’re just lucky they didn’t sent Lancelot to bust me out,” he said reflexively.

“We’re going to drug you again,” she said, and got to her feet. “I think it’s been long enough between doses. You should be alright.”

“You better not fuckin’ kill me,” he grunted. “Merlin’ll be right annoyed.”

“Don’t worry,” Al said, and produced a long wooden tube, holding it out to Eggsy for inspection, “I’ve fixed the dosage. Maybe you should lay down, I wouldn’t want you to break anything else.”

Grumbling, Eggsy awkwardly lowered himself onto the ground on his side, bringing his knees up into the stress position. As he went, he tried to dislodge the bread, but it just seemed to squish further into his boxers.

“I feel bloody ridiculous,” he muttered.

“You look it,” Lavinia cocked her head at him, smirking. “Good god. You reek, too. Like the backroom of a butcher-shop.”

“This is some fuckin’ weird bondage shit you’ve got goin’ on, innit? You couldn’t just tie a bruv to a chair, eh?” he complained, twisting to try to relieve the tension on the leads. “Had to be the _fancy_ torturer.”

“How many times have you managed to escape that exact situation?” she pursed her lips at him and raised her eyebrows, “we try not to take chances with your kind. Galahad senior crushed someone’s windpipe between his knees, then jumped out a second story window and ran to safety with the chair still tied to his back, like some kind of turtle terminator _._ ”

“I woulda liked to see that.”

“I’ll send you the video, I use it as a training material. Now then, it’s been good talking to you, my dear. Do take care.” she gestured Al forward. The man put the tube to his lips, and a second later Eggsy felt the dart prick his thigh.

“Peel the bread off, wouldya,” he managed, before darkness overcame him.


	2. Ndili Bwino

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is a bit weird. Its nowhere near as fun as the last one, I guess.

He awoke in the boot of a car.

 _Well fuck_ , he thought, though at least his hands and feet were free this time. The car was stationary too, and, even when he strained his ears, the only sounds he could make out were innocuous: bugs chittering, cars passing, the wind whistling.

He wondered what country he was in. It was hard to say, but it didn’t feel like Sudan.

He fumbled for a moment in the dark, and found, to his surprise, what felt like a glow stick. He snapped it and green light filled his tiniest of cells.

There was a note taped directly above his face, so close it fluttered when he breathed.

_Galahad the Younger—_

_Hello, or as they say in Malawi, bo-bo. You’re quite near a little town called Ntcheu, between the major cities of Blantyre and Lilongwe. You have enough money to get a ride to either, plus a bit left over for a spot of lunch. I suggest Ama Khofi in Lilongwe, try the quiche._

_I enjoyed our chat._

_L_

He escaped the trunk easily enough, though his abrupt appearance nearly gave a passing woman a heart attack, and sent the tray of mangos on her head crashing to the ground. She let him help her pick them up, only shooting him a few suspicious glances.

The car he had been in was a relatively new looking Subaru four door, driven about twenty feet off a snaking, surprisingly well maintained, tarmac road. Otherwise, he could see nothing remotely familiar. He appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. There were a few low, mudbrick houses set away from the road, and a couple dozen more in the distance. Some were tin rooved, but most were thatch. The country-side was verdant with lush, tall trees casting shadows over fields of what he guessed was corn. Only the land with houses on it seemed to be uncultivated, and the ground under them was a rusty red-brown. Powerlines snaked overhead, but they didn’t connect to any of the houses. It was so jarringly different from the cell that he was sure this must be some kind of drug induced lucid dream. The only thing that kept him from crawling back into the boot and waiting to wake back up in the cell was that whenever he imagined the Africa country side, it had a lot more animals, and there was not so much as a zebra in sight. 

On the road, a few people passed, mainly walking, though there were a couple on bikes. They stared at Eggsy and the woman, a few waving when he happened to catch their eye. Occasionally, a car would streak past, seemingly heedless of the people or the possibility that other vehicles might exist somewhere in the world.

From the position of the sun, he would guess that it was early morning, but it was already hot enough to make him uncomfortable. His captors had redressed him in a Kingsman suit, it was a bit rumpled, but it could still stop a bullet, which was all he cared about at the moment.

God knew what his face looked like. He was probably lucky the woman hadn’t decked him when he popped out of the boot, because, while she was a head shorter than him and maybe twenty years older, her biceps were almost the same size as his. She wore a pristine white tank top that seemed to repel the dust that had already dulled the shine on Eggsy’s shoes, and what he had thought was a skirt, but actually appeared to be a bolt of fabric wrapped around her waist. Her shoes were plastic and bright silver.

 “Lilongwe. I. go. To. Lilongwe,” he said, slowly and clearly, when she had hefted the mangos back up onto her head.

“To Lilongwe? You can get a minibus down there. Here, I will show you,” she gestured him forward. “You don’t want to take your car?”

He blinked. Colonialism. Right.

“No, it’s uh, stalled. I’ll send one of my mates down to get it,” he said, scrubbing as much of his accent as he could from his speech, and followed the woman. She was utterly unhurried, picking her way judiciously across the uneven ground, and casting occasional glances to ensure he, unburdened and properly shoed, was keeping up.

“My name is Gertrude,” the woman offered, when they reached the road.

Ouch. That was even worse than Gary.

“I’m Galahad.”

“Galahad,” she frowned, delicate features scrunching. “Are you English?”

“Yah, I’m from London,” he told her. They fell into step on the tarmac, the number of people on the road had now grown to a small crowd. Some were actively staring at him, while others ducked their gazes when he caught their eyes. He tried smiling, and found that everyone in his eye line smiled back.

“Hello,” an old man said, “how are you?”

“I’m alright, how are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” the man grinned, murky brown eyes twinkling. He seemed to be the tipping point, and the other dozen or so people within speaking distance greeted him politely, one after the other.

It made him feel a bit better, honestly. When the introductions were over, he made faces at the baby slung across the back of a woman walking in front of him. The baby giggled and burrowed into his mother’s back, peering out at Eggsy from between his pudgy little fingers.

The woman with the baby said something to Gertrude, and they both laughed.

Turning to Eggsy, she said, “You’re the first white person the baby has met.”

“I hope I made a good impression,” he said, crossing his eyes when the kid peaked his head up, “what’s his name?”

“Patience.”

“Huh. Nice name.”

They chatted for a bit, about the baby, his sister, his marital status and what he was doing in the country. He’d vaguely answered ‘working with an NGO’ to the last, and it was hardly even a lie. While he doubted that Kingsman would qualify for non-profit tax exemptions, they were donor funded.

Gertrude sold mangos in the market some days, but she spent the bulk of her time working on her farm. She was married, had four children and she went to Lilongwe twice a year. He wondered what Merlin would have to say if he just took the day and helped her sell mangos—well, ‘helped’ might be a strong word. Perhaps: didn’t actively hinder her selling of mangos. Maybe he could sit next to her and attract customers.

Ahead of them, he could see a cluster of white vans along the both sides of the road. He could already hear the hum of human voices and he felt nostalgic for the quiet of a few moments before. A row of shops lined the stretch, a bit larger than the little houses dotting the country side. Most were plastered white, and all seemed to be advertising a different variety of soap or Coca-Cola.  Between the shops and the road, there was a small, but lively market. Clothes were hung up on scaffolds made of hewn branches or spread out on tarps on the dusty ground. He saw a few racks with bolts of patterned cloth like most of the women on the road were wearing. There were also people selling vegetables; tomatoes and some kind of leaves, mostly, as well as dried beans, onions, carrots and potatoes.

He realized he was starving. Proper, food or faint, starving. Even the onions and weird piles of leaves looked positively tantalizing.

A little further along the road, he bought six balls of fried dough and a clear plastic bag of water from a teenage girl who couldn’t stop giggling. Gertrude didn’t look very impressed with her.

He offered the bag of dough balls to his friend, and she took one.

“ _Zikomo._ In Chichewa, we say ‘ _zikomo’_ for thank you,” she told him, and waited for him to repeat the word.

“ _Zikomo_ ,” he said, copying her slow, heavy pronunciation. He looked to her for approval, but she just nodded shortly, half smiling.

She led him through the throngs of people, slipping between them elegantly, despite the tray of mangos on her head, while Eggsy trundled along behind her, dodging people and doing his best to look unobtrusive. When they reached the white vans, Gertrude had a short conversation with one of the drivers, and ushered him into the van with the most people on it. The van hadn’t exactly looked great from the outside—the paint job was scraped to shit and the front window was cobwebbed with cracks, but it hardly even looked like a vehicle on the inside. Any paneling or insulation that might have existed had been ripped out, and it was nothing but a rusted, sharp cornered metal exoskeleton, resting on four equally dubious looking wheels. The four rows of seats were covered in kind of plastic upholstery which made no attempt to appear comfortable, and the metal and wood of the seats peeked through holes and worn out patches. Death trap didn’t seem an appropriate assessment, because the word ‘trap’ implied you wouldn’t see it coming. 

“Okay,” she said, when he was seated in the second row back, the metal of the seat already digging into his ass. “This minibus is going to Lilongwe. Where are you going exactly?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said, sheepish.

“You don’t know?” Gertrude repeated, eyes wide. A few of the other passengers murmured worriedly around him. He was a bit touched by their concern.

“Umm, the bus station?”

“Tch,” she shook her head, and turned to confer with one of the young men loitering next to the minibus. They glanced at him periodically, but otherwise didn’t see fit to include him in the discussion.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, waving his hands to attract their attention.

She looked deeply sceptical, “maybe you have friends there you can call?”

“I think I do,” he said, just to reassure her.

“Okay. Okay. You will call me when you find your friends?”

“Uh… my phone is dead, but tell me your number and I’ll remember it.”

She did, though he knew she didn’t believe him. He promised to call, bought five mangos from her and settled back into his seat. She leaned against the van for a few more minutes, saying nothing, just waiting with him. The seats were made for three, but the ones behind him already had four each, plus a few bags of rice and a smattering of children.

“Okay, I’m going now,” she said, a few minutes later, when the van was almost full, though she didn’t seem to want to.

“Bye,” he said, not really wanting her to go either, “and uhm, _zikomo,_ for, y’know, everythin’.”

“Good bye, Galahad.”

He watched her plastic bowl of mangos thread through the market until he lost it behind an ox-cart. He felt utterly alone, suddenly, the way he had the first time he returned to Harry’s house after V-Day. His clothing was ill-suited to this minibus, and between that and the paleness of his skin, he felt exposed and out of place. Like the only nudist at a beach. In Saudi Arabia.

He was pulled out of himself when a woman, who looked like she was older than written language, handed him a live chicken in a plastic bag and used his shoulder to pull herself up into the bus. She had a frighteningly firm grip and knuckles like walnuts.

He stared down at the chicken. It stared back, pure aggression in its beady little eyes. _Come at me, bruv_ , it seemed to say.

This was the closest he had ever been to a live chicken. It kind of smelled, actually. He decided he preferred them in nugget form.

The old lady sat behind him, and, once she was settled, took the chicken back like an afterthought, like Eggsy hadn’t been locked in a pretty epic staring contest with the thing.  She shoved it down between her feet, where it squawked plaintively.

 _Poor bastard_ , Eggsy thought. One minute, it was eating bugs, pecking corn, strutting around like king shit, the next it was consigned to a black plastic bag on a hot day, probably on its merry way to someone’s dinner table. Had it guessed its fate? Why had it never run? The answer to both of those questions, of course, was that it was a fucking chicken, and therefore unable to comprehend concepts higher than _food_ or _not food_ , but something in Eggsy ached for the bloody thing.

Three more people shoved into his row, he bought a few bags of chips from a boy who looked like he was about eight, and they were off.

He dozed, as much as one can doze in a vehicle meant for a maximum of fifteen that had been crammed with about twenty three, plus his friend the chicken and a couple babies. His nose began to ache about an hour in, and he figured his captors must have slipped him something for the pain, which was pretty considerate for people who’d then dumped him in the middle of a country he probably couldn’t locate on a map.

The drive took about four hours, including the thirty minutes they spent broken down while the young guy who’d taken all the passenger’s fares hammered whatever had the audacity to malfunction into submission, and maybe half a dozen stops. The van got pretty good speed, plus they were constantly passing anyone going even slightly slower than they were, no matter how many cars there were in the oncoming lane. While Eggsy liked a game of chicken as much as the next testosterone stricken young man, but he generally preferred there to be no infants involved. After a while, he just began watching the oncoming lane with a kind of melancholic fatalism. Everybody in the car, from the chicken to the girl two rows back who had a baby on her lap that Eggsy hoped wasn’t hers, would die eventually, anyway. What did it matter, in the grand scheme of things, if it was today?

To distract himself from the grim spectre of fate and the oppressive, sticky heat of the minibus, he bought something different to eat every time they stopped. Vendors came up to the windows of the bus and he just shoved bills at them and pointed. First popcorn, then home-made crisps in a blue plastic bag that had warped with their heat, a boiled egg to stuff in his last dough ball, a bottle of unnaturally yellow juice, and a few pieces of fried meat that he was pretty sure were intestine. The man sitting next to him had given him a thumbs up while he chewed the meat, which had roughly the same consistency as truck tire. He made a bit of small talk with his fellow passengers, nodded along to the music the driver played, mostly reggae, and generally thought of nothing but how pretty (and surprisingly peopled) the country-side speeding past looked.

If he ever had to go to ground, he wouldn’t mind doing it here. There were white people in every country, he’d be no more or less suspicious than any of them, and, from the aplomb with which Gertrude had taken his escape from the car’s boot, it seemed people here were used to foreigners behaving a bit oddly.

The minibus station in Lilongwe was frenetic chaos, a wild press of people, colour and careless motorists. The driver took a long look at Eggsy, who was hovering next to the minibus like a baby deer did its mother, and jumped out of the cab.

“We get you taxi,” he said, sighing, and clapped Eggsy on the back. “Come on, my friend the mzungu.”

“Th—er, _zikomo_ , mate,” Eggsy said, and allowed himself to be propelled through the crowd. People in Lilongwe were less interested in greeting him than they were in Ntcheu, and less willing to step out of his way.

“There,” the driver pulled Eggsy up short and pointed to a cluster of cars a bit further down the dusty, potholed road. “Watch the cars. You don’t want to die in Malawi.”

Eggsy thanked him again and darted across the road as soon as there was an opening. The drivers clamoured around him, but he just chose one at random and slipped into the back seat.

“Know any good hotels?” He asked the driver after the cursory ‘hello, how are you’s had been exchanged.

He could almost see the dollar signs in the man’s eyes. Or the—what was the currency here? He pulled out a bill. The Kwatcha. Then um… Kwatcha signs, whatever sign that might be.

“Crossroads,” he answered immediately, “or the Sunbird.”

He frowned, “they both have pools?”

“Yes.”

“Crossroads,” he said, at random.

=--=-=-=-

Later, when he was installed in what that front desk had assured him, with admirable professionalism, was the most expensive room in Crossroads Hotel, he called Merlin.

He’d given the front desk fake information, they hadn’t asked to see his passport, so he hadn’t needed the lie he’d concocted about getting an Egyptian visa. He’d also given them his credit card number, along with a story about being robbed that had made the pretty concierge go wide-eyed and comp him dinner. But, unless they’d already charged him, there was no way Merlin could know where he was. How many days had he been dark, he wondered, he hadn’t even so much as glanced at a Newspaper ofn the way from the depot. He had done it once before, half intentionally that time, but it had only been for a twelve hours, and Merlin had cursed for a solid thirty seconds before he began extraction protocols. And when Eggsy got back to London, he’d fucked him over his desk the second the debrief was over.

Once he passed the security measures, the phone rang twice. Dead air hung between them for almost ten seconds.

“Galahad?” The Scottish brogue sounded guarded.

“The one and only,” he was grinning, because it was unbelievable good to hear his voice. The lost feeling that had settled in his stomach when Gertrude left him on the bus dissipated.  

“Fucking hell,” he could hear the man deflate over the phone. He hardly even sounded angry, which was… a bit unnerving, actually. “Where are you?”

As if he hadn’t already traced the call.

“Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe, Malawi,” he said, “what day is it?”

“It’s been five days since you last checked in,” Merlin said heavily, “we were about ready to start taking nominations for your replacement.”

“Sorry guv, I know how much you like using that clipboard.”

 “Galahad,” Merlin was abruptly serious, and Eggsy all but snapped to attention, “are you injured?”

“My nose is fucked,” he said, “I had a goose egg, but it’s gone now. And my knee’s a bit swoll’ up. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“What happened to your nose?” Merlin was going for casual, Eggsy could tell, but he missed by miles.

“I—uh,” Eggsy hesitated.

He must have taken it for distress, because he said, with gentleness that turned Eggsy’s stomach, “you don’t have to tell me now, lad.”

“No, no,” the words tripped out, because Merlin called him _lad_ and the other man must thought that he spent the last five days being tortured, “No, it’s nothin’ like that. It’s just a embarrassin’. I—uh, sort of tripped.”

“You tripped.”

“I was drugged, alright,” he muttered, defensive. “Face first into the fuckin’ toilet.”

“In your hotel in Khartoum?”

“Yep. You find the blood?”

“No, the room was scrubbed. No other injuries?”

“Nah, look, Merlin, they didn’t fuck with me or nothin’. I—I’m not sure what happened, but I only remember being awake for a couple hours.”

“Did you get any names?”

“Yah… er, Lavinia? She told me to tell you ‘hi’. She did the glasses video, poured fake blood on me. D’you know her?”

The line was silent for a few seconds. He felt certain that Merlin did, in fact, know her.

“Did she dump you in the boot of a car in the middle of nowhere?”

“Yep,” Eggsy said, “but she left me bus fare.” 

“And how long, exactly, have you been awake without calling me?” He was ice cold again, all the weariness and sympathy gone. It was strangely comforting, yet frightening. But that was Merlin in a nutshell, and Eggsy was glad to be back on solid ground with the man.

“’Bout four hours.”

Silence. Like that of the grave, or perhaps, like that which one hears a second before the gun shot that puts one in the grave.

“I see. We’ll debrief later, await instructions Galahad.”

Then he hung up.

Eggsy stared at the phone, stared some more and called Gertrude.

She, at least, was happy to hear from him.

-=-=-=-

The next morning, he woke at six am. He was shaking, but he didn’t know why. He thought he must just be cold. Then he thought he might be having some kind of a breakdown, that maybe he’d been having one since he woke up in Ntcheu. It never occurred to him to go to Blantyre. In never occurred to him to see if there was a key in the car, or if maybe he could hot wire it. He never thought that he should just ask to borrow Gertrude’s phone and pay her back for the airtime. And, in that room, talking to that woman, it had never occurred to him to just keep his mouth shut and stare at the ceiling.

He drifted, thought of Merlin. His cool hands, calloused and strong. He rather liked Merlin’s hands. It didn’t surprise him that _she_ hadn’t been able to see the prints those hands all over his body. Everything they talked about had been somehow sacred to Eggsy, something guarded and carefully hoarded. Something he, and only he, owned. Merlin’s hands remained firmly attached to the man himself, and Eggsy laid no claim over him.  

He tried to pull himself out of himself, but there was no lady with a live chicken in a plastic bag to grab his shoulder. He was adrift. His brain was riddled with tiny blood clots. His muscles were atrophied and wasted. Tumours sprouted like mushrooms on his liver, black spots spread over his lungs, his teeth disintegrated like sand sculptures in the high tide. His stream of consciousness swirled into the void behind his eyes, thoughts limping through mutilated and melted into each other, like the survivors of a nuclear blast.

He was on autopilot, a drone had taken over his eyes, his ears and his hands. He tried to think of a joke, something witty to say to Loveness, the sweet concierge, or Yamikani, who’d been his waiter the night before, but there was nothing. There were other things—anxiety, a growing fondness for Malawi, exhaustion, loneliness—but he couldn’t find anything like humor. Or, and he thought that this might be the important one, anything like anger. 

He should panic. Instead, he turned on Al Jazeera.

=-=-=-=-=-=

Merlin left him in Lilongwe for three days, which violated every post-mission procedure the man himself had drilled into Eggsy’s head. He was probably meant to stay in his hotel room and think on his life, think on his choices, but Eggsy decided to take a bit of a vacation.

He palmed the wallets off a couple of Americans who’d been rude to Loveness and, suddenly, he was rich. Well, Malawi rich. He wandered the city, eating mostly in the little improvised restaurants by the roadside, eschewing all the more expensive places. He rode the minibuses all over town, wandered the market and bought a few bolts of cloth, which Loveness told him were called _chitenje_ s, for his mother. They looked like they would make good table cloths, though the idea of Daisy getting her sticky paws on them made him cringe.

His knee felt good as new, he had no residual headaches from the goose egg and even his nose was beginning to look more like—well, like a nose.

He was almost disappointed, when, as he was having his morning coffee at the hotel—it cost more than his lunch did, usually, but he liked to have an excuse to sit by the pool—and a slight, blond man slipped into the seat opposite him. He was wearing khakis and crocs, a pair of Raybands sprawled hedonistically across his face, looking like exactly the kind of asshole tourist Eggsy was beginning to hate.

“Denis Quade is an American hero.”

Any other time, he would have snickered and feigned ignorance, but Eggsy just sighed and said, “yep?”

He slid an envelope across the table. When Eggsy opened it, he found a British passport with his cover identity’s name and passport number. The picture, however, was not him. It looked a bit like him, and also a bit like the man across from him, but Eggsy doubted it was either of them.

“I came in yesterday,” the man said, “works out well, since I won’t be needing it anymore.”

“Cheers mate,” Eggsy said without smiling and slipped the document back into the envelope. The man was making his skin crawl. “When’s my flight?”

“Thirteen forty, to Addis Ababa, then on to London. The airport’s not too busy, but you’ll still probably want to be there a couple hours in advance.”

Then he got up and left, apropos of nothing. Eggsy finished his coffee, returned to his room, folded his belongings into a _chitenje_ , and watched TV until it was time to leave. Al Jazeera, National Geographic, and then the tail end of a shitty movie. Tension ate at him, and the ragged calm that the last three days had furnished him with evaporated. He should never have been left here so long. He should have been extracted the moment he called. He’d been kidnapped, injured, interrogated, and they’d left him here, penniless, for three days. No communication with anyone, though he had dropped an email to his mother yesterday, who hadn’t seem concerned. Roxy had probably been texting her as him.

He’d probably talked to Gertrude more than anybody. Their conversations weren’t all that exciting, she had a lot to say on the topic of maize cultivation and her miscreant son-in-law, but they soothed him. He would keep her number, and send her a bit of cash when he got home. Maybe she could buy some shoes that weren’t made out of silver plastic.

He left the hotel around eleven. At the airport, he split his remaining kwatcha between the fifteen or so men clamoring to carry people’s luggage, even though none of them even tried to take his _chitenje_ bag for him.

He flew a lot now, and it had stopped being thrilling a few months back. He rarely took the Kingsman jet, which wasn’t altogether covert, and Merlin liked to punish him for ruining his tech by sticking him in economy, often within earshot of a crying baby. As if he didn’t get enough of that at home.

But this ticket was first class, no children under three in sight, and while that didn’t make much of a difference on a tiny plane like this, it make the back of his neck prickle with apprehension.

Oh well. He’d already made it further in life than he’d imagined possible, and if that asshole was thinking of doing him in, he might as well get some free booze out of it.

He hoped to at least survive the flight, though, if only because he’d made up his mind about a few things while he’d been roaming Lilongwe. Like, he’s going to get his sister a proper nanny. He’ll tell his mother it’s only for a few weeks, so she can have a bit of a vacation. She’ll will get used to the freedom and they’ll keep the nanny. Daisy will catch up to her friends. Maybe his mother will find a job. Maybe she’ll meet a new man. Maybe he won’t be exactly like Dean. But he probably will be.

Just like Eggsy might find a man, or a woman, and fall in love, and they’ll probably be exactly like Dean.

Though, he thinks, sometimes, that maybe _he’ll_ be Dean.

That notion, something he’s never spoken, and is hardly able to name, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, is so terrifying that it has curdled every date he’s ever been on. Maybe it’s some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, though, because the only way he’ll ever be sure he’s not Dean is if his partner is, and in the same way, the only way he’ll ever be sure they’re not Dean is if he is.

Fucking dark, that kind of thinking was, but these days, he was a pretty fucking dark guy. And he was probably just going to get darker.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=--=-=-=-=

They put a black hood on his the second he stepped into the loo. They probably had people in every toilet in the terminal. The Addis Ababa Airport wasn’t all that big, so he didn’t imagine it would take that much manpower. He wondered, halfway through shoving his fist as deeply as he could into his attacker’s gut, if that was why they put him in first class. They had known he would sop booze like a sponge, then need a piss.

Those fuck-bags, taking advantage of Eggsy’s inability to turn down free alcohol. Downright uncivilized.

Someone clocked him in the nose, and his eyes teared, but he couldn’t see with the bag over his head, anyway, so it doesn’t slow him down. Guy number one went down easier than hundred pound tequila.

He heard three different sets of feet on the tile floor, and he barreled towards the one that seemed closest, howling with rage. Oh, he was going to draw a crowd. Served them right, for trying to abduct a man in a toilet.

Him and toilets recently, shit.

“I’m goin’ start pissin’ in houseplants,” he screamed, at two of four, who, after a few muffled seconds of groping, Eggsy had gotten by the shoulders. He wrenched the man down, pulling his face into Eggsy’s knee. But before he could connect, he felt the air move behind him and pivoted on instinct, sending his hip into the counter top and the guy’s face ended up not so much in his knee as his crotch.

Ouch. Ball pain. Fucking worse than nose pain, but he was too far gone now for it to matter. He just kept shoving the guy, then aimed a few vicious kicks at him when he got down to shin level.

A fist cracked across his ribs, and he rolled in the direction of the force, spinning along the counter as he went. His back hit tiled wall and he wrenched the bag up over his mouth, dodging when he heard guy number three get too close. He threw a Hail Marry of a wild hay maker at where he thought the guy might be, and it was fucking sloppy, but, to his surprise, his fist connected with a wet creak. Ribs. Eggsy didn’t hesitated; he pummeled every inch of the guy he could get his fists into, it was messy, the kind of thing a scrappy street punk would pull, but it was effective.

He took a few punches, mainly in the torso, but he hardly felt them. His blood was singing, trilling with death. He kneed the guy in the balls, then twisted him around and got his hands under his jaw. _He was studying to be a chiropractor, he really was, just relax and let the pain float away, mate._

“Galahad, no!” a proper, girlish shriek gave him pause. Under his hands, the man wiggled, but he held firm.

“Lancelot?” He called. He had always assumed that he would just know her, somehow—it was strange that they had been in a room together, and he hadn’t known. He had a premonition of a dart in his neck, so he brought his hostage up to cover most of his body. His biceps trembled with the effort; he was a heavy fucker and was doing his best to be dead weight.

“It’s me, let him go Eggsy, it’s just a mistake,” she said, sounding careful. Fuck, everybody seemed to be taking liberties with his goddamn name, lately.

“What’s goin’ on?” He asked, proud of the steadiness of his voice.

“It’s Kingsman, the guy you’re holding is a Kingsman, Eggsy. One of the extraction agents. We’re just here to get you, that’s all,” she said, and he could practically see her, standing with her hands out, imploring, the way she had been when she asked what was going on between him and Merlin. He remembered the hurt on her face then, the confusion. He was glad she couldn’t see his. “Trust me.”

That was the fucking worst thing a person could say to him right now, short of telling him they shot his sister, and he laughed. Something wet trickled out of his mouth.

“You fuckin’ black bagged me!” he was screaming then, not yelling or shouting, but screaming, “you fuckin’ CIA’d me, you fuckin’ cunt! Head in a bag in a foreign airport, you gonna take me to their fuckin’ black site in Eritrea? We’re just next fuckin’ door! Where you think I been? A fuckin’ health spa? You black bagged me after—after—“

“I know,” and she sounded like did know. She’d be caught before, more than him, but she’d never been caught by the likes of _her_. “I know, look, I have Merlin on the line. He’ll explain, okay, just calm down.”

He hated her fucking posh accent then. Jesus fucking Christ, they mocked him with every breath, didn’t they. Didn’t they?

The man in his grip had gone too limp. Eggsy had been squeezing awfully tight. He let him go, with fingers that were suddenly numb. Even if they put a bullet in his fucking brain, Eggsy would be fucking _damned_ before he ‘and I will call him George’ed someone to death.

He ripped the hood off his head. Lancelot was perched atop one of the stalls like a falcon. Three bodies, counting the guy Eggsy wasn’t sure if he’d killed or not, were lying broken on the floor. Then, like Velma lifting a mask of a monster, it hit him, if she was up there the entire time, then number four had to--he felt something crack him over the top of the head, and heard Roxy scream. Damn it, he was a shite spy.

Then it was blackness. Fucking again.

==-=-=

Lavinia is there, in his dreams. She pets Mr. Pickle, who lies stiff and motionless in her lap.

Her eyes are suddenly everything and everywhere, his entire dream, entire consciousness. Roxy is screaming. Lancelot is laughing.

Merlin has his eyes closed, if he opens them they will be white and unseeing. Al comes toward him, dragging two tomatoes plants with him. He and Merlin greet each other like old friends.

Eggsy knows, suddenly, that he’s not coming back from this.


	3. Ciamar a tha sibh?

_I shoulda just been a crack dealer_ , Eggsy thought desperately, when he awoke restrained for the third time that week. _Hell of a lot safer. Less violent. Jay-Z was a crack dealer, worked out pretty fuckin’ well for him._

Eggsy couldn’t sing worth shit, though, and there was no way in hell whoever the chav version of Beyoncé was would ever give him a second look.

He was not quite as restrained as the first time, but a bit more than the second. His legs and upper-arms were strapped to a hospital bed, and he was in a sterile white room that looked like most sterile white rooms, but it wasn’t one that he recognized in particular.

There was a little tray with a cup of yellow Jell-O on it next to his bed, a few uncomfortable hospital issues chairs and some typically shitty little paintings on the wall that made him hate art. One of the chairs had a coffee mug balanced on one arm and a book squished into the seat.

He drummed his fingers on the bed spread.

_Hello, your prisoner is awake. Hello?_

He didn’t think about Roxy, or the bodies in the bathroom. There weren’t very many explanations for what had happened, and he didn’t particularly want to think of any of them. He focused on his anger. Well he tried to, but he couldn’t deny the twisting pain in his gut, the gasping sea of panic under the crust of his anger. That guy had brought the porcelain lid of the back of a toilet down over Eggsy’s head, and that was just straight up something you did not do to your own people. And if Eggsy wasn’t their own people then--

Then nothing and no one. He struggled out of the grasp of that line of thinking. Roxy had said she had Merlin on the line, and if she was telling the truth, he had nothing to worry about. As much as he might try to trust the rest of him, he trusted Merlin absolutely.

_He betrayed me. Seems a paltry word for it, but—_

With great effort, he put his entire being into wondering how long he’d been out. He was almost surprised he was alive, actually. Surprised he remembered what happened. It had been a heavy object, but maybe his attacker hadn’t hit him that hard? He felt he should have some type of residual trauma to point to and say, _yep, that’s from the fuckin’ header I did into a slab of porcelain_.

Also. Toilets, and the dangers they posed. As unexpected as the chicken in a bag, this new pattern of toilet related head injuries was.

He checked his range of motion. He could swing his forearms in circles, hula-danceresque. Twitch his knees. Move his head a bit. Fantastic.

He was on drugs too, the serious kind. Even better.

His head—well, he could feel the bandages. He’s also pretty sure they’d cut his hair a smidge, the fucking arse-wallops. He giggled. Arse-wallop. Where did he get these things? Oh, the drugs, right. The drugs were where he got these things.

Well, he had a sense of humor again, that was good. Some nice anger to go along with it. All it took was a little gratuitous violence and grievous bodily harm.

He felt a few twinges from the rest of his body, along his ribs, his tail bone, his knee, but nothing serious. Everything seemed in working order, until he ran his tongue along his furry teeth, and found that one of the bastards was missing.

His fucking tooth.

He was suddenly furious, angrier than he’d ever been since he joined Kingsman.

He was reminded of being a shitty, dirty teenager who forgot to brush his teeth so often that his gums got a bit fucked up. His teeth bled every night for a month when he brushed them, and he lay awake at night, poking at them, sure they were getting wiggly. He’d never been so terrified about his own body before. His tongue kept searching his mouth, like he was going to find it hidden behind a molar or something, but that’s it, one down, thirty-one left to go before he fucking kicked it.

Merlin, of course, chose that exact moment to walk into the room, fresh as a fucking tulip in a cashmere sweater.

“I’m missin’ a tooth,” Eggsy said. He tried to shout it, but it just came out sort of tired and sad.

Merlin nodded.

He sat in the shitty hospital chair next to Eggsy’s bed.

Eggsy turned to look at him—he looked less flower-like up close. His clothing was neat and pressed, glasses smudge free, like he might have polished them before walking in, but his face was grey and pulled tight.

“Did I kill any of them?” he asked, in a neutral voice.

“No,” Merlin said, quietly. His voice broke the stillness between them in a way that Eggsy’s hadn’t. “But one is in a coma, probably brain damage. Another will need reconstructive surgery if he is to ever eat solid food again.”

Eggsy nodded, swallowed. He stared forward, at the hateful brown-scale painting across from the bed.

 “I’m sorry,” Merlin’s voice was soft. Eggsy had never heard him sound like that, and it chilled him, probably more than not getting any apology at all would have. His first instinct was to shake his head, tell him it was alright, but his tongue rubbed over the new gap in his smile.

 “What the fuck?” He gesturing with one forearm, at himself, at Merlin, the cup of jell-o and the smell of anti-septic, trying to encapsulate the entire cluster fuck on one motion.

“They were meant to drug you.”

“Fan-fuckin’-tastic.”

“It—it never should have escalated like that. I take full responsibility, but all the same, all members of the extraction team not currently in hospital have been terminated and Lancelot has been suspended from active duty for the time being.”

Eggsy sucked his lower lip and swept his gaze over the room, “Shouldn’t you be gettin’ the doctor? Askin’ me questions ‘bout what I remember?”

“What do you remember?”

“Everythin’. Strange, innit? Being head trauma and all. I remember bein’ black bagged in a toilet, Lancelot bein’ there, sayin’ I could talk to you, then gettin’ brained by a toilet lid. Imprinted into my brain, it is.” Eggsy said coolly, impressed at how level he managed to keep his tone.

“What’s your name?”

“What the fuck?”

“You wanted questions,” Merlin said. It was the kind of thing he might say, if Eggsy were waking up in hospital, alone and confused. It would sound teasing, he would smile. Eggsy would smile back.

Instead, they watched each other with mouths pulled in grim lines.

“Gary Unwin. The year is 2016. The last date I remember was March 18.”

“It’s March 19, now. You weren’t hit very hard, you were out under a minute.”

“Then they drugged me.”

“Then you woke up, clipped Lancelot in the jaw and we tazed you. Then we drugged you.”

“Hm.” There was the blank spot. Hopfully he hadn’t pissed himself when they tazed him.

“You must be angry,” Merlin said. His gaze was firm on Eggsy’s forehead, not meeting his eyes, but not backing down, either.

“And how did you come to that startling conclusion? Was it the tazing? Or the leavin’ me by my lonesome in Lilongwe for three days?” He snapped the sentences out like machine gun fire, “also, can you get me some fuckin’ water, I’m a bit fuckin’ parched, what with the coma and all.”

The older man all but jumped out of his seat, “yes, of course.”

He took a jug of water from under the side table with the jell-o on it, and poured a small, plastic cup of water. Into the cup he placed a straw. His movements were small and precise. The silence stretched between them like a metaphysical tundra. He’d never seen tundra before, but he’d once read it described as t _he unshaved face of God_. Where, he could not recall.

Watching Merlin, the way his fingers were just a bit too steady, Eggsy realized, with something like horror, that he now had a type of power over him. What had happened in the last week, what Eggsy had suffered, whatever Merlin had clearly fucked up, had allowed him to get one over on the man. He owed him. Not just owed, though, he felt beholden to Eggsy, guilty. And, worst of all, he was showing it, bleeding emotions that on a good day wouldn’t come within an inch of the surface.

A very small, very cold part of him was pleased. It smiled with a cruel mouth, smelling like clove cigarettes and beer. 

Merlin held the straw carefully in his long, calloused fingers and rested it gently on Eggsy’s lower lip. He drank.

“It was nothing you did,” Merlin said, after he put the water away and sat back down. “It was _her_. I was remiss in your education—yours and Lancelot’s. In my day, we spent the first three weeks of our appointment reading files, mission reports, notable individuals, that kind of thing. _Lavinia_ ,” he spat her name, “is someone you should have known about and been able to anticipate. Our protocol, when an asset comes into contact with her, is to break protocol completely. To be completely random in the way an asset is extracted from the situation.”

“And you thought the best way to do that would be to ambush me in a toilet.”

“No,” Merlin hesitated, “the stewardess was meant to slip something into your drink on the plane. By the time you reached the bathroom, you should have been nauseous, and too weak to put up much resistance. She put the powder in your soft drink, but it wasn’t until you departed the plane that she realized you didn’t take more than a sip or two of it.”

“It was warm,” Eggsy said, remembering, “She should have put it in the comped shot of rum she gave me.”

“Yes,” Merlin made a face, “well, she was a Malawian.”

“Fuck does that mean?” Eggsy snapped.

“I only meant she wasn’t one of ours,” Merlin’s spine snapped straight and his tone was frigid, “for God’s sake, Eggsy, I know you got knocked on the head, but that’s no excuse for implying that I’m a fucking racist.”

“Fuck you,” he snarled back, “my fucking head hurts and I’m missing a goddamned tooth. I can’t close my fucking eyes without seeing that woman’s face and I have no fuckin’ idea why, but I’m still strapped in like Frankenstein waiting for the lightening.”

They glared at each other for a moment. Eggsy felt hot in his scrubs, a kind of nascent, feverish heat that had nothing to do with room temperature. His heart pounded with fury, and his stomach heaved and tossed. All at once, Merlin’s face softened and he raked his hand across it, smudging his pristine glasses.

“You’re right,” He said, his brogue thickening, “Christ, what a nightmare. Lavinia is famous, not just for being a skilled interrogator, but for being able to _reprogram_ agents. She’s also done a fair bit of damage to Kingsman in the past. We don’t take chances with her—that woman is Lupis. The symptoms present differently in everyone, but they are universally devastating.” 

“You thought she what? She fuckin’ brain washed me? Flipped me? Jesus Merl,” Eggsy muttered, rolling his shoulders. “Fuck, you’re still not fuckin’ sure, are you? What the fuck do I—“

“She had you for five days,” Merlin cut across him. His face was working its way back to its usually calm and vague condescension, but guilt flickered in the corners of his mouth. “She broke Harry in two. This is not about you, Eggsy.”

“She broke Harry…She told me that—she told me she interrogated him. She said she didn’t hurt him, though.”

“She didn’t need to. That _woman_ is a nest of snakes.”

“Who does she work for?” The question had been plaguing him for the last few days. Somehow, he didn’t think very many Eastern European intelligence agencies ran ops in Sudan, “I thought it might be FSB or somethin’.”

“She’s an independent contractor. She’s mainly worked for agencies in the Middle East and North Africa. But she started out with SHIK—“

“Who?”

Merlin made a disgruntled noise, sounding more like himself, “You’ve never read a single document I’ve ever sent you, have you? SHIK was the precursor to SHISH. The Albanians, lad. When the organization dissolved in the late 90s she was trained in BOS, Albanian Special Forces, but since 2002 she’s been self-employed.”

“Huh,” Eggsy grunted, _Albanian issues,_ eh _?_ He started to ask another question, but the older man raised a hand.

“Let’s debrief first, then I’ll bring you her file. I don’t want to talk about her more than I have to. Tell me as much as you can remember.”

Eggsy sighed. He started with breaking his nose in Sudan, which should have made Merlin smirk, but just made his mouth go harder, and then gave him an abbreviated version of the interrogation: they talked about their ‘pasts’, their ‘relationships’, and he didn’t reveal any information about Kingsman, only about himself. He didn’t mention the Andreas or her ominous message about misplaced trust. He did tell Merlin about her rather worrying knowledge of Kingsman, but he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t seem much of anything, really, he hardly questioned Eggsy’s account at all, interrupting only once to ask if he knew Al’s last name.

“… but I think her information on Kingsman is a bit out of date: she kept talkin’ about Arthur, even though he’s dead. Unless we got a new one while I was out?” Eggsy finished, heaving a gusty sigh, “that’s it, mate. Then I woke up in Ntcheu. Nice place, Malawi. Been wonderin’ how she got me there, though. It’s like five countries away from Sudan, no direct flights, even.”

“Hmm,” Merlin grunted. He looked pensive, “we didn’t release Stein. Actually, when she mentioned him, we looked into him a bit deeper. He wasn’t working for that Men’s Rights group, he’s a weapons trafficker, apparently just there on business, and got caught up in the raid. The information we’ve gotten out of him so far has been… promising.”

“So she did us a favour, then. Well, other than me, I guess. And Lancelot.”

Merlin snorted. “She never does anyone any favors.”

“Sounds like you know a lot about her, guv,” Eggsy said carefully, “you said she reprograms people… is ah, is that what she did to Harry?”

“No… well, not as such. But we can’t take any chances.”

“Lupis, right,” he muttered, still peeved, “what did she do to Kingsman, then, to get you so hot and bothered?”

Merlin was silent for a few minutes, face was utterly still. His chest rose and fell, soft breath rustling a stray thread stuck to his sweater.  Merlin never had stray threads.

“She infiltrated us. About a decade ago,” he said finally, “it was a Honey Pot.”

“Of Harry?”

Merlin laughed, it was a ragged, terrible sound, like the tearing of expensive fabric, “Of me.”

Now was the time, Eggsy knew, to say something like “ _you don’ have to tell me about it, if you don’t want”_ or _“I just can read the file”._

“Tell me what happened,” he said, instead. It was an order, snapping out in a tone Eggsy’s old Marine sergeant would have been proud of. He froze as soon as it left his mouth, but the other man hardly even acknowledged him. His eyes were distant, and his face was caught in the same terrible stillness.

“It was in 2005,” Merlin began, voice mechanical and measured like a witness giving testimony. “I was a regular handler back then. She posed as a waitress in a restaurant on Edgeware Road. She called her self Lailuma Wazir—all of her known aliases have a first name starting with ‘L’. I have no idea how she managed it, it was the first time I ever ate Afghani food, I lived nowhere near the restaurant. There was no connection between me and that place.

Even the people who owned the restaurant believed that she was the daughter of a relative they had lost contact with. She was—claimed she was, anyway, an Afghani who’d paid smugglers to take her overland from Kabul. I even helped her get her paper work in order.”

He paused. When he continued, he was no longer testifying. His face stayed the same, but the words poured out of him, bitter and barely contained, like a river flowing under winter ice.

“You must understand that her performance was flawless. Lailuma Wazir was shy but opinionated, ruthlessly funny and terribly dramatic when she wanted to be, a staunch atheist who rarely drank, and never swore. She was Pashtun, but she knew Arabic, Dari and Urdu as well. Every time we met someone with an accent she recognized, she would speak to them in their own language. She had scars and nightmares, but she was a refugee and I never wanted to ask. Her hands—well, you saw them, they’re capable hands. But she told me her father was a mechanic and that she helped in the shop. She wasn’t even very muscular. She met over a dozen members of Kingsman staff, and no one ever questioned anything about her. Not even Harry. They got along famously, argued for hours about history, politics. I was so _jealous_.

She bugged my person, my home office, planted viruses on my computer that mined data. She also bugged Harry and half a dozen other agents. She stole more information than every other breach before or since, combined.”

The man paused, breath coming in short, sharp bursts. Eggsy couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He reached out for where Merlin’s hand rested on his mattress, but he couldn’t quite grasp it, so he ran a finger over Merlin’s cuticles. The skin between the nail and the first knuckle was the softest on the man’s body. His nails were dirty, as always, and the skin around them was ragged. He started slightly, but didn’t move his hand away.

Merlin cleared his throat, “Harry comes into the picture near the end. It had been six months since I met her, and I was taking part in the Merlin trials, which are considerably shorter yours. The only people considered for Merlin are those who already work for Kingsman, mainly handlers, sometimes techs. I was to be away three weeks, assuming I was successful. She and Harry went out for dinner—she liked to take him to restaurants with obvious health code violations and watch him squirm. He tried to pay her back by taking her to posh places, but she would wear shalwar kameez, and play up her accent. And this was 2005, right after the 7/7 bombings.

I took me four years to get the story out of him, and I’m still not sure if he’s told me the whole of it: She and Harry were having dinner. When they left the restaurant, they were attacked by about a dozen men. Harry managed about half of them, but they put a gun to Lailuma’s head and he surrendered. They claimed they were part of a drug smuggling ring that Harry had been looking into. They tortured her to try to get Harry to confess his involvement—beat her, raped her. He refused. Stayed completely silent the entire time.

Lailuma, for her part, confessed everything. Her suspicions about what Harry and I did for a living, told them about a blood stained shirt she found in my washing, the late nights and suspicious scars, everything. But that was to be expected. She was meant to be a civilian, after all.

After that, they locked them in a concrete shed, no food, no water. No cameras. That’s a signature of hers, she never uses cameras. She was a huddled mess, curled in the corner speaking Pashtun, hardly responding when he spoke to her in English. But the more he talked, the more she seemed to calm down, an eventually she began to respond to what he was saying. To ask questions of her own. Their captors kept them locked in the shed for two days, and they—well, they talked. You would think that he would have kept the information from her, to protect her. Plausible deniability.

But he didn’t. First, he told her about the case he was working on, the one he thought had led to their imprisonment. And then—and then everything. Everything about himself, his cover identities, the other Kingsman, old mission reports, ongoing ones… Absolutely everything. They must have spoken for the entire 48 hours for her to get so much out of him. He told me later that he never realized she was directing the conversation, that it always seemed as if it was his idea to tell her.

On the second day, their captors had came to kill Harry. But he was ready for them. They obviously didn’t know what kind of fish they had caught when they brought Harry in, and the way they restrained him bordered on amateurism. They tied him to a chair, binding his hands together, winding a rope around his torso and then tying his feet to the chair legs. He’d managed to get his feet free using the knife in his shoe, which was all he needed. He hadn’t been able to do it before because they’d been so focused on him and his reactions, but no one was watching him in the shed."

Here Merlin paused, lips shuddering into a rueful smile, “maybe that was it… wouldn’t be surprised if she—if she. It doesn't matter now,” he shook his head and continued, “They put a gun to his head. Lailuma screamed at them not to kill him. And the one with the gun, who had never shown a shred of remorse or indecision, hesitated, for just a split second. Such a tiny detail, a miniscule, throw away thing that happened at a moment of extreme tension. But Harry noticed. And from that twitch, he was able to unravel the entire clusterfuck—the parts that mattered, anyway: Lailuma knew their captors. And, she had some type of authority over them.

That’s how good she was—she managed to dupe Harry Hart for six months, a man who was able to extrapolate the whole plot from the twitch of one grunt’s fingers. It was probably the only reason I wasn’t fired on the spot—because she fooled Galahad as well, she had fooled all of us. I was, however, removed from the Merlin trials that year, and passed over for candidacy for the ones in 2008. Galahad was taken off active duty for six months.

Even knowing something wasn’t right, Galahad killed the guards—shattered one of their tracheas, apparently and they escaped together. Well, he did most of the escaping, freed her from her chains and dealt with the rest of the guards while she followed after him. There’s footage of that, at least.

Once they had cleared the warehouse, and he had managed to divest himself of his bonds, he—well, he’s never actually recounted exactly what he said, but two points are clear. He told her he knew she was involved in the kidnapping, and then he told her to run.

There’s footage of that, as well. It’s a bit grainy, but she’s positioned perfectly. She probably knew the camera was there. When he confronted her, when the game was up, she transformed from a huddled victim to a smirking, straight backed, utterly confident twenty-something. Her stance changed; her arms, always held close to her body, relaxed at her sides, she stood with her feet further apart. Her injuries were extensive, but she moved like she didn’t feel them. Even the way she held her head was different. Harry said her accent changed, becoming Eastern European, and so did her diction. As I said, there is… video. No audio, obviously, but it’s rather unnerving all the same. I suppose I could have it queued up for you, if you wanted to see it.

When she ran, she did so in the way soldiers run, measured and like she was carrying a phantom pack. He told me, once, when he was more drunk that I’ve ever seen him, that the possibility of apprehending her, the possibility that he even _could_ apprehend her never even entered his mind.”

Merlin seemed to have to physically stifle himself, mouth snapping shut with a click of teeth. Eggsy stared directly forward, eyes avoiding the ugly painting across from him and seeking the open white wall. _Jesus fuck_ , was the only thought he had, the two words revolving in his mind, bright and lit up like a ticker tape disaster announcement at the bottom of a TV programme.

“Jesus fuck,” he relayed to Merlin, unable to contain the words any longer.

“Indeed,” he said, in a good imitation of his usual self.

“Fuckin’ cunt.”

“Quite.”

 _You loved her_ , he almost said, but kept quiet.

“How—what now,” Eggsy asked, after a few minutes had passed.

“You need to talk to a few people. Have a more through debrief. It will probably involve a few psychological assessments—the time you don’t remember is concerning.” He hesitated, “honestly Eggsy—you failed to check in as soon as you regained consciousness in Ntcheu. It’s worrying.”

“Yah. Bit. It is a bit.”

“If all goes well, you should be able to go home in about a week.”

“That’s fine.”

“I am sorry.”

“You did what you thought was right, didn’t you? To protect Kingsman?”

“Well, yes. But—“

“That’s enough, then, for me.”

Merlin just looked at him, saying nothing. Then he dug the book out from where it was wedged between the arm and the cushion of the couch.

“I should go,” Merlin said. “You should get some sleep.”

“Yah.”

The conversation felt impotent, unfinished. Ripe with the unsaid. He had questions, nebulous anxieties tumbling in his chest like dice in a cup, but they refused to form into words. He wanted to tell Merlin to stay, he wanted to demand that he leave. He’d already forgiven him, but it was a trite forgiveness that his body, which always seemed to remember more viscerally than his mind, flinched back from.

“You’re sure—you’re sure there’s nothin’ else?” Eggsy asked, surprising himself with the question. “No other reason you’re keepin’ me chained up like this? I mean, I get it, she’s a supervillain or whatever. But—“

“No,” the older man said forcefully, “no. She is not to be under estimated.”

“Alright.”

Merlin stood, shuffling next to the bed.

“Sleep, Eggsy,” He said, in the same, uncharacteristically soft tone he had adopted earlier, and ran his thumb over the younger man’s brow. There was a tense line between his eyes, and his mouth was still hard, “Everything will work out.”

“Alright,” he repeated, but didn’t close his eyes. He was not reassured. “Wait! You think you could do something for me?”

“What is it?”

“If I’m goin’ to be away so long, maybe you could send a nanny over to my Mum and Daisy. To help her out while I’m gone.”

The older man nodded, solemn, “I’ll see to it.”

“Thanks, Merl.”

He watched Merlin leave, and it seemed to him that even his stride was slower, less sure. A nurse came in shortly after, checked his vitals and looked over his chart. She had a Scottish accent, and spoked to him in short clipped sentences, never quite meeting his eyes.

Sometime later, when she had gone and Eggsy had returned to his own thoughts, he did fall asleep. It was not a pleasant experience. When he woke, half screaming and fighting the restraints, it occurred to him that they must have cameras monitoring him. He shrunk into himself, the white darkness suddenly full of peering eyes.

His hands fisted in the sheets, knuckled screaming with the abuse they’d taken in the past week. Harry had had such nice hands, long fingered and posh as anything, despite decades of rough handling. Eggsy’s were getting pretty scarred up and calloused, already effecting the permanently swollen look of a boxer’s. One day they might even become as tell-tale as Lavinia’s.

When he sat in cafes on his off days, which he did more and more, he stared at his hands holding glasses of juice or little cups of Turkish coffee and found it hard to imagine them killing people. When he had a finger on the trigger, thumbs on the trachea, palms on the back of the head and underside of the jaw, he found it hard to imagine them any other way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a few things. This was not my best chapter, and it also took a while. Sorry. I am aware that there are many unanswered questions, but this is all Eggsy knows, for now. 
> 
> Also, while this is just fanfiction, I feel the need to say that Lavinia pretending to be an Afghani refugee is in no way meant to be a comment on the current refugee crisis or anything like that. If I'm going to be political, you'll know. First, she didn't go through official channels, which are very rigorous, plus it can take years to get asylum. She was smuggled into Britain illegally, but even then, that is often the last resort of a lot of desperate people, most of whom are just looking for a better life. She is a character I made up, who is kind of verging on evil, and in no way indicative of the kind of people who come to Britain looking for refuge. 
> 
> But seriously, that awkward moment where you were kidnapped by your current lover's former girlfriend, who was in fact a mole that left him emotionally scarred, nearly destroyed his career and mind fucked his best friend, who is (was) also your former lover. Maybe he should have been a crack dealer.


End file.
